TransBuddhism: Transmission, Translation, and Transformation

Acknowledgments

ix AC K N O W L E D G M E N T S The idea for this volume and for many of the essays collected in it arose from a year-long research seminar funded by the Henry and Louise Kahn Institute at Smith College. We gratefully acknowledge the support of the Kahn Institute and in particular the assistance and encouragement of Marjorie Senechal, then director of the institute, and Rick Fantasia, the current director. Peter Gregory was a co-convenor of this seminar, and we thank him for his leadership. We also thank our other faculty colleagues in the seminar, Andy Rotman and Ardith Spence for the insights they provided, and we acknowledge with gratitude the participation of the ten student members, two of whose essays appear in this volume. We are especially grateful to two distinguished visiting Kahn fellows, the Ven. Prof. Geshe Ngawang Samten and Achan Sulak Sivaraksa. Each contributed enormously to the seminar and to the ideas represented in many of the essays in this volume. Bruce Wilcox of the University of Massachusetts Press has been very helpful in bringing this project to fruition, and we benefited from the advice of three anonymous reviewers for the Press. Meridel Rubenstein created the images of the Thai trees and monks for the Kahn Project. Her other images of Vietnamese and American Trees (2000–2004) are part of the Millennial Forest Project, which previously appeared in her monograph Belonging: Los Alamos to Vietnam (Los Angeles: St. Ann’s Press, 2004). “Translation as Transmission and as Transformation” first appeared in the APA Newsletter on Asian and Comparative Philosophy, 2005. “Toward an Anatomy of Mourning: Discipline, Devotion, and Liberation in a Freudian-Buddhist Framework” first appeared in Sophia 47 (2008): 57–69. An earlier version of “The Transcendentalist Ghost in EcoBuddhism” appeared in Bukkyō to Shizen (Buddhism and Nature), Kyoto: Research Institute of Bukkyo University, 2005, under the title “Baptizing Nature: Environmentalism , Buddhism, and Transcendentalism.” The final preparation of this volume would have been impossible without the heroic efforts of Carol Betsch, Candace Akins, Mona Morgan, Caroline Sluyter, and Kolsang, to whom we are grateful. TransBuddhism ...